"Is this [place] sanitary, it looks questionable to me!"

Today, I had the amazing opportunity to go to the Mulago National Hospital with the nursing students here at UCU. Holy Cow....

Let's just say that it wouldn't pass ANY heath inspection in the states. We got to the hospital at about 9:30am and I then shadowed a nurse and his patient. All of the nurses were to find a patient, in a specific ward they were assigned and be with them the entire day. Our patient was involved in a boda-boda accident and had 4 fractures in her hip and dislocated her ankle. She wasn't able to move at all, so we had to everything for her. Luckily, she wasn't in high demand of anything.

One thing with the hospital, is that there is no separte rooms for any of the patients, there is just rows of beds. And, all of the patients have to supply their own sheets, pillows, food, and wash them selves. So, if anyone in your family is admitted into the hospital here, the entire family comes to camp at the hospital, no joke.

Some funny things that happened during the day:
We had come to give Rehema (our patient) an injection of pain killers. After we had given it to her, the lady on the bed next to us told us that she hadn't gotten here pain killers for the day. Edson looked at her file and found no record of any injections given to her. He went to go find out what to do... once he came back, he got the injection ready. The lady asked if it was ok, he said, "No, but we need to keep our patient happy." haha woops, hopefully the lady survives.

We were right by the bathrooms, which smelled purely of urine and there was a tracks from people walking into and out of them (presumably urine tracks). Pretty gross.

There was one lady there that looked like she got burned pretty bad. When the doctors came to clean the burns, it was obvious she was in loads of pain. She was yelling, "Jesus! Oh, Jesus Christ come to my side." over and over again. It just about broke my heart, I wanted to at least pull a curtain around her, but for the lack of curtains...


I have to say: what an experience!! I am grateful that the hospitals in America are more sanitary. I'm not sure if I would be able to handle being a nurse in a place like Mulago Hospital. I guess that these experiences are only those you can have in Africa!!